Author: VD

An unamenable authority

Notice how Apple attempts to utilize its position as a market gatekeeper to force other companies, such as Gab, to jump through various hoops, and potentially, even converge itself, in order to access the customers Apple controls.

An abbreviated summary of Gab’s travails, as described by Andrew Torba:

They want us to include our guidelines in the app and update guidelines to include the NSFW language. It’s absolutely beyond ridiculous the hoops they are forcing us through. Every rejection has more requirements. We will get there. Or we will raise hell about it.

Folks this is what we got back from Apple. Every time we fix what they want, they magically come up with new requirements. It’s absolutely disgusting. They want us banning people. They want us to add blocking. They want us removing content within 24 hours. This is insane.

Folks we are pushing back on Apple bigly.

  • We have feed filters. 
  • We have user muting. 
  • We have the ability to flag content.

There is absolutely no way this app should not be approved. Submitting an appeal, then raising hell on this issue in a very public way. Apple wants to play? We will play.

Here is our reply to Apple folks.
-We have feed filters.
-We have muting.
-We have flagging for illegal content.
-We review flagged content and can address it quickly if it breaks the law/guidelines.
-We can certainly show examples of “objectionable content” on any other social platform.

Now, as anyone who has been on Twitter or Wikipedia knows, there is a considerable amount of NSFW content, none of which is marked as such. But it’s pointless to try to base an argument on this obvious double standard, because SJW-converged corporations are shamelessly hypocritical and they don’t hesitate to play ideological favorites.

Just as a right-wing employee will be fired over the smallest perceived infraction that doesn’t even violate company policy while an SJW employee can violate multiple company policies at will without suffering any consequences, every Alt-Tech organization will be, to at least some extent, obstructed and frozen out by the SJW-converged tech giants.

That’s to be expected. The problem will get worse before it gets better, but it is only a problem in the short run, because whether the Alt-Tech organization runs the gauntlet, as Gab has, or elects to simply ignore it, as Infogalactic has to date, the experience will only make the Alt-Tech stronger and more disruptive.

On the radio

Today at 9 AM Eastern I’ll be appearing on Jesse Lee Peterson’s show. For details concerning where you can hear it, check @jlptalk on Twitter.

And for those who might be tempted to sperg about my “don’t talk to the media” policy, note that he’s a WND man. I am always pleased to speak with friends, allies, and colleagues, in public or in private.

UPDATE: the link to the recording.

I disavow

Barack Obama is guilty of being the worst anti-semite in the world, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

Obama’s refusal to veto anti-Israel U.N. vote ranked most anti-Semitic incident of 2016. Simon Wiesenthal Center puts U.S. abstention at top of annual list.

Dreadful. I disavow Obama and all his works. And anyone who doesn’t is a Nazi and worse than Hitler.

The price of thought-policing

Is eternal vigilance. Fortunately, several intrepid Wikipedia admins are up to the task of patrolling the Wikipedia page devoted to me. It’s rather amusing; first David Gerard, who is an admin and is so neutral on the subject that he cited Phil Sandifier as a reliable source, removed all references to Infogalactic and tried to deny my involvement with it.

  • (single source and that questionable; see talk page. it is entirely unclear this warrants mention *at all*, let alone two subsections. get consensus for inclusion first.)
  • (rm infogalactic – cut’n’paste of multiply-deleted article, closest it has to third-party coverage is one Breitbart article; not notable in mainstream or its field)

He even tried to justify his own patrolling of the page on the basis of his own bias.

I might note, I just today published a negative review of a Castalia book on Phil’s site, so I hold the WSJ-certified typical opinion of Vox Day, but that I find doubles my caution and I’m second guessing myself – David Gerard (talk) 00:37, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

However, when editors kept putting mentions of Infogalactic on the page, he finally gave up, although he was careful to add an irrelevant detail concerning something we have not only never denied, but have repeatedly pointed out to others.

In 2016 Day launched an online encyclopedia called Infogalactic,[25] forking the content of Wikipedia.

This is how the Wikipedia admins police thought there, by constant nibbling away at the edges. Infogalaxians chronicles how two admins, David Gerard and Dragonfly Sixtyseven slash repeatedly away at the page over the course of a week in the interest of removing all the material they think they can justify removing.

The reason they do all this repeated nibbling and sausage slicing is because the editors eventually start to notice something isn’t right.

  • Day published his recommendations in his blog, which is the primary source but in the article, this is now also documented through secondary sources, i.e. SF magazines. I think it’s a good idea to include both, as it allows the reader to independently verify the information. The primary sources show that respected publications like Slate and the Guardian in this case are clearly unreliable. Pkeets (talk) 16:55, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
  • I’m kind of appalled looking at some of these articles from sources that are usually considered reliable. It looks like they didn’t even talk to Day when writing these articles about him. Kelly hi! 17:24, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Or, do any research about the subject. They seem to have worked off assumptions. That means identifying bias and reliability in the sources will be important in establishing a neutral POV info in the article. Pkeets (talk) 19:09, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

I’m far from the only individual targeted in this way. Another tactic, which was previously utilized unsuccessfully against my page, is the “denial of notability”. In this case, they use the fact that the mainstream media ignores massively successful self-published authors – in this case, one of the top 20 SF authors on Amazon – in order to claim that they are not notable and delete the page.

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/B. V. Larson

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article’s talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was delete. The “keep” arguments are considerably weaker in terms of policy and guidelines, and often add up to “but he’s very commercially successful, so he must be notable”. Well, not according to our inclusion guidelines, as Tokyogirl79 points out. Her thorough analysis of the available sources hasn’t been seriously addressed by those wanting to keep the article, which also weakens their side of the argument.  Sandstein  17:13, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Non notable author with no adequate references for notability. none of his books are held in more than 80 libraries a/c Worldcat; Technomancer has 79, and the others are fewer than 20. DGG ( talk ) 21:00, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Delete References now on page (Amazon.com, Audible.com) cannot support ntability. He gets a few press mentions, Here: [1],and here: [2], news google search on his name [3], but not enough to source a page or support notability.E.M.Gregory (talk) 15:01, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Delete. I found the same results: he’s brought up occasionally as a WP:TRIVIAL mention, but sadly he has never received the type of coverage that Wikipedia would require to satisfy notability guidelines for authors. He’s pretty much one of many authors whose works are self-published (either partially or entirely) or indie that has a fan following, but not one large enough to attract attention from places Wikipedia would consider reliable. Most of the sources I found were either WP:SPS or in places like SFFAudio, which are kind of squiffy as far as whether or not they’d pass Wikipedia’s fairly strict verification guidelines. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 08:13, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Your argument is well-reasoned, but the sources still don’t add up, from what I can see. Essentially, in the reliable sources (newspapers, mainly, and the one book) Larson is merely “name-checked” — that is he is mentioned by name in sentences like: “…self-published writers including B.V. Larson and A.G. Riddle.” And that’s all. What we need is for there to be an article ABOUT him, or at least that goes into some depth, in such a source. That’s what WP requires for notability. Sources that aren’t neutral (like Kindle, which publishes him and therefore has a vested interest in making him look good), can’t be used; nor can personal web sites and blogs. One of the sources starts out “Guess what! My cousin Brian is also a science fiction and fantasy author!” That’s obviously not a neutral source. I agree with you that it’s unfair that self-published authors don’t get more attention, but until they start getting reviews in established sources, we have no reasoned way to separate wheat from chaff — and, quite honestly, from the few self-published books I’ve opened up, there’s a lot of chaff. LaMona (talk) 18:37, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

I would think that going platinum as an author would be one adequate way to separate the wheat from the chaff; selling a million books is inherently notable. This is why Infogalactic is so important, and why it will be necessary for us to ruthlessly crack down on admins and editors who want to play the same shady game of shaping a particular narrative to suit themselves, regardless of what it is.

The response is still restrained

I expect Europe will see considerably more violence in 2017. And unlike in previous years, it won’t all be one way.

A group of Muslims reportedly stabbed a 21-year-old polish man to death in the street on New Year’s Eve after he threw a firecracker in the general vicinity of their Kebab shop. Poles responded the next day by smashing their shop up and throwing bricks through their windows.

Video of the incident shows a large crowd cheering their retaliatory strike.

“I would be happy if there weren’t a single Arab in our country,” one protester who did not take part in the vandalism said. “I am against foreigners ruling in our country, in our beautiful town, and that they would do such things! We don’t need them here! They have their own countries, they should rule in their home countries,” he said.

The attackers were reportedly two Algerians, a Tunisian and a Moroccan.

If the murderers aren’t executed, I expect the next ones won’t escape with merely having their shops destroyed. Europeans have lost all confidence in the willingness of their governments to provide them with either protection or justice. And they are gradually beginning to understand that no amount of tolerance will bring peace now that diversity is upon them.

Fake news at the Washington Post

I’m sure we all look forward to Facebook banning links to the Washington Post due to the fact that it is a confirmed provider of fake news:

The Washington Post has retracted its story about Russian hackers penetrating the nation’s electricity grid with a virus found in a Burlington, Vt., electric company laptop.

“Authorities say there is no indication of that so far [that Russians had penetrated the US electric grid],” according to an editor’s note attached to a corrected version of the story on the paper’s Web site. “The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid,” the editor’s note read.

News of the supposed hack had set off a firestorm of recriminations, with Vermont leaders calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “a thug” earlier Saturday, after one of the state’s electric utilities found a virus on a laptop computer. A utility spokesman has also told the Burlington Free Press the laptop was not hooked into the grid.

The amusing thing about the whole SJW “fake news” strategy is that even liberal observers predicted that it was going to be turned around and used against the mainstream media. This simply goes to show, once more, that a calm and strategic approach combined with ruthless tactical meme magic is an extremely effective approach to defeating the SJWs despite their possession of the cultural high ground.

On a related note, James Delingpole pens a savage declaration of war on the Liberal/Globalist/SJW/Media/Establishment Left at Breitbart London:

We will take the fight to the enemy, not cower in No Man’s Land

One of the best things about 2016 for me was the way it gave the lie to the weaselish and wet aphorism – so often repeated by so many of our impeccably reasonable, sensible and balanced TV and newspaper pundits  – that elections are “won in the centre ground.”

This was the Belial philosophy that gave us, in the U.S., that hideous continuum from the Bushes and the Clintons to Obama; and in Britain, the grotesque and malign Third Way squishery that took us from Tony Blair through to his (self-admitted heir) David Cameron and beyond. (It’s also the mindset which invented the disgraceful, sell-out concept of “soft Brexit”.)

No wonder so many of us had become so fed up with politics: no matter which party you voted for, whether the notionally left-wing one or the notionally right-wing one you still seemed to end up up with the same old vested interests, the same old liberal Establishment elite.

Of course we should always despise the liberal-left because their philosophy is morally bankrupt, dangerous and wrong. But I sometimes think that the people we should despise most of all are the squishes who pretend to be on our side of the argument but forever betray our cause. Sometimes they do this by throwing the more outspoken among us to the wolves in order to signal how tolerant and virtuous they are; sometimes they do this by endorsing some fatuous liberal position in order to show their willingness to compromise.

I call the latter approach the “dogshit yogurt fallacy.”

If conservatives like fruit or honey in their yogurt and liberals prefer to eat it with dogshit, it is NOT a sensible accommodation – much as our centrist conservative columnists might wish it so – to say: “All right. How about we eat our yogurt with a little bit of both?” We need to understand, very clearly, that there are such things as right and wrong; and that, furthermore, it is always worth fighting to the bitter end for the right thing rather than accepting second best because a bunch of lawyers and politicians and hairdressers from Brazil and squishy newspaper columnists and other members of the liberal elite have told us that second best is the best we can hope for.

On Brexit, for example, I’m with Her Majesty the Queen: “‘I don’t see why we can’t just get out? What’s the problem?’


We will never apologise, never explain, never surrender

See those scalped corpses, littering the plains? These are the guys – and it is, invariably, men – who thought that if only they showed contrition for their confected crimes the enemy would leave them alone. Sir Tim Hunt apologised, the guy from Saatchi apologised, the guy on the Rosetta space programme who wore the “sexist” shirt apologised. A fat lot of good it did them. The vengeful liberal-left doesn’t just want humiliation – it wants total annihilation.

Giving even an inch of ground to an enemy so implacable and vile is not only futile – but it also badly lets the side down by granting them a power that they do not deserve. The most recent sorry example of this was Steve Martin who actually deleted a tweet praising his late friend Carrie Fisher as a “beautiful creature” because a bunch of feminazis on Twitter complained that this was sexist objectification.

Look, I know it’s a scary thing when the SJW witch-hunt mob turns on you. But read Vox Day’s SJW Attack Survival Guide, follow the example of Nigel Farage and fight these people to the very last bullet (keeping the final round for yourself). Do not surrender!

We may or may not be outnumbered. The recent European referenda and the US presidential election suggest that we are not. We may not have the high ground. But we are never outgunned, intellectually or literally. Do not surrender, do not apologize, and do not hesitate to go on the attack, either directly or circumspectly, every single time you encounter an SJW anywhere.

Immigration is invasion

In There Will Be War Vol. X, Martin van Creveld demonstrated that immigration is war is immigration. The idea that because immigrants are unarmed, they are not invaders is more than simply false, at this point it is observably a lie. National borders are simply being overrun and nations are being conquered; the fact that neither guns are swords are being used is irrelevant:

RIOT police fought running battles with a mob of more than a thousand migrants who tried to storm Europe’s borders and force their way into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta today. At least 1,100 asylum seekers rushed the barbed wire fence protecting the tiny north African enclave, which is surrounded on all sides by Morocco, in a desperate bid to reach the EU.

Spanish and Moroccan authorities desperately fought to restore order as the migrants, most from sub-Saharan Africa, scaled the border barrier and brawled with police. Once inside the miniscule Spanish territory they would be able to claim asylum in Spain or travel onwards towards the promised lands of Germany and Sweden.

The migrants used rocks and metal bars as they battled with police officers from Spain and Morocco, who joined forces to defend the border. Television footage showed migrants perched on the top of the fence as they tried to get over. Around 55 police officers were injured in the chaos – 50 from Morocco and five from Spain. Moroccan authorities said 10 of their security personnel had been serious wounded during the fighting.

It is reprehensible that Europe’s governments are assisting, rather than sinking, the invaders’ ships and refusing to shoot the invaders, even those who are violently attacking those guarding the national borders. Violence is coming one way or another; better it take place on the borders than inside them.

How would it have been any less an invasion if Hitler had sent one million unarmed Hitler Jugend to cross the English channel on rafts seeking asylum? In the 1940s, the British had the courage to defend themselves. These days, virtually no one but the Saudis, the Hungarians, the Poles, and the Swiss are willing to do so.

Two questions

Both Selenoth-related. And yes, this is an example of the stuff we discuss at Brainstorm from time to time, but I need more general opinions on these two items.

1. A number of people have been saying they would like to see some sort of summary of the previous book in order to help refresh their memory of A THRONE OF BONES, or even to let them jump right into A SEA OF SKULLS. I really don’t like the idea of a conventional “What Has Gone Before”, since I don’t like intruding on the text, but I can imagine where a letter or two, such as appeared in the first book, might be apt. They would go into the Extended Edition, probably after the Prologue. Yes/No?

2. A few people have encouraged me to crowdfund the two audiobooks, because they are so long that it’s hard to find top quality narrators interested in ACX’s revenue share option. While we do have one good English volunteer presently tackling the short stories and Summa, it’s going to take him a long time just to get through those; I think he’s wrapping up Witchking and is moving on to Wardog soon. (We’ll put them out together with Summa, just as we’re doing with the print.) I’m a little leery about the crowdfunding idea, since you guys are already supporting so many things and this is simply not something I consider a priority on the order of Infogalactic, or even Brainstorm. A top-quality narrator goes for 200 to 400 per hour, and ATOB alone will require 36 hours. Do the math and you can see the problem. Anyhow, share your thoughts on this, if you have any.

To be blunt, I don’t listen to audiobooks myself, so it’s just never been a priority for me. But, I understand some people love them, and I can understand that fans of epic fantasy probably would enjoy having 72+ hours of Selenoth to listen to. So, I’m open to ideas and suggestions. Please note that I’m not looking for volunteers; we have a good volunteer already and I’m not willing to do anything that isn’t going to be both professional and excellent.

The state of publishing 2017

Larry Correia fisks a minor author who appears to be hell-bent on convincing herself that mainstream publishing is the only way to go despite having sold fewer books than every single Castalia House author:

I realized that Laurie wasn’t providing writing advice for people who actually want to make a decent living as writers. She is providing advice to people who want to be aloof artistes at dinner parties, before they go back to their day job at Starbucks.

As for what Laurie says about gatekeepers, it is all horse shit. She has no flipping idea what she’s talking about.

Publishers are the “gatekeepers”. If they like you, you’re in, and if they don’t like you, you’re out. Problem is, at best they only have so many publishing slots to fill every year, so they cater to some markets, and leave others to languish. And at worst, they are biased human beings, who often have their heads inserted into their own rectums.

Agents represent the author. Their job is to find stuff they think they can sell to a publisher, and then they keep 15%. So “good” is secondary to “Can I sell this to the gatekeepers?” And then we’re back to slots and rectums.

Editors try to make the author’s stuff better. Period. They aren’t gate keepers, because it is their job to make the stuff that got through the gate suck less (seriously, the HuffPo should hire one).  Only self-published authors can hire editors too. Andy Weir hired Bryan Thomas Schmidt to edit the original self-published The Martian. Last I heard that book did okay.

“National and international reviewers” are on the wrong side of the gate, and I’m baffled why she included them. Reviewers come along after the fact, some are useful, but most aren’t. Even though I was ignored or despised by most of the big review places for most of my career, they haven’t made a lick of difference to my sales.

These gatekeepers are assessing whether or not your work is any good.

The problem is that “good” is subjective. What you personally think is “good” is irrelevant when there are a million consumers who disagree. I wouldn’t buy a copy of Twilight, but the author lives in a house made out of solid gold bars. “Good” is arbitrary. The real question is whether your product is sellable. (and yes, it is just a product, get over yourself)


Readers expect books to have passed through all the gates, to be vetted by professionals. This system doesn’t always work out perfectly, but it’s the best system we have.

It was the only system we had before technology came along and upset their apple cart.

When only the gatekeepers could vet what was “good”, sometimes they were right, but since often the “professionals” were 20 something lit majors just out of college, or some clueless weasel who had spent his whole existence in the echo chamber of Manhattan publishing, often the system fed its own tastes and ignored vast swaths of the market.

And when you neglect a market, it will spend its entertainment dollars elsewhere. So in this case, competition is good. Because the real competition isn’t between traditional and indy publishing, it is between reading and movies and video games and streaming. Ultimately the market decides who wins, not some self-appointed gatekeeper.

As Larry correctly observes, her atttitude is that of an author who is more interested in personal validation than professional status. The viability of independent publishing doesn’t mean there isn’t some advantage to publishing with the Big Five, especially if your name happens to begin with MILO. But, as in so many other things, what works for Milo is very unlikely to work for you. He’s a genuine star. Regardless, even very successful independent writers who sell millions of copies don’t hit #1 on Amazon months before release.

Nor is print anywhere close to dead. It’s not really fair to compare our print sales to our digital sales, since less than one-third of our books are in print yet and we have even fewer audio books out, but the breakdown of Castalia’s 2016 book sales is as follows:

  • 67.8% ebook
  • 20.5% print edition
  • 07.5% Kindle Unlimited
  • 04.2% audiobook

That’s unexpected, since we originally assumed Castalia would be an ebook-only publisher. But the real game changer, where the mainstream publishers are concerned, is KU. They don’t play there and they can’t afford to play there. And since publishing is a negative sum game, every $12 million paid out per month by Amazon probably represents at least another $48 million in revenue lost to the major publishers plus around $10 million lost to the authors published by them. It’s my suspicion that Amazon tries to set the KU compensation so that an author will make roughly the same amount from a KU sale-equivalent that he’ll make from conventional publishing sale, rather than the same amount he’ll make from an ebook sale.

KU isn’t great for independent publishers even though some of our big books pay out more per book equivalent than we make per sale. For reference, the average KU payout per page was $0.004848 in 2016. But at least we can afford to be there.